Entering the Oil Sketch

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape artists often sketched outdoors in oil paint on paper to capture nature from direct observation. Yet as natural as these scenes look, the vantages were chosen or augmented to draw the viewer into the composition. Whether through adding a prescribed path, capturing flecks of light glinting off a winding river, or presenting a series of plateaus receding into the distance, artists created a point of entry and route along which the viewer could journey. These small-scale oil sketches—including a work by one of the few female European landscape painters of her era, Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont—illustrate how artists synthesized the real and ideal to evoke the experience of encountering nature.

Entering the Oil Sketch highlights works from the collection of oil sketches given jointly to the Morgan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Eugene V. Thaw, a trustee of both institutions.